For the time being I’ve disabled trackbacks on my blog. I don’t really know what else to do about it at the moment.

I was just reading some stuff in my feed reader* when I came across this from the Official Google Blog:

We’ve added a bunch of new features, which you can check out in the new version:

• You can add stuff to your blog (cute cat photos, lists, feeds) without needing to know HTML.
• You can also make a completely unique template that has just the color scheme you want, without knowing any CSS.
• Don’t want your mom to read your thoughts? Make a private blog.
• Label your posts, to group related ones together. Use one of our new templates.

Let’s see. The “add stuff to your blog” bit sounds an awful lot like the widgets in WordPress. I’ll have to give it to them, being able to make a template without knowing any CSS is pretty darn cool; WordPress guys, pay attention to that one! The private blog bit, though? Come on. That’s blatantly ripped from the WordPress.com guys. Even the options page for it seems eerily reminiscent of the Privacy page in the WordPress.com dashboard. Label your posts, huh? Categories, anyone? Yeah, I thought so. And lastly, Google has finally thrown out some new templates. The WordPress.com guys have been regularly adding new templates for quite a while now.

I must admit. I’ve used both Blogger and WordPress.com now, and I can’t imagine ever going back to Blogger, even if the responsiveness of the site is much better now. (When I first started blogging a few years ago on Blogger, it was terrible. Sometimes it’d take 3 or 4 tries to publish a post.) WordPress is just better than Blogger, period. And yes, I know: I’m biased.

* Just a note: I’m not anti-Google at all. In fact, I love Google and many of their services. Gmail is my only email app, and my feed reader is coincidentally Google Reader. I just think with WordPress.com becoming such a hit, Blogger.com might be a lost cause. All of the cool kids are going to WordPress, as they should.

Technorati Tags: blogger, google

I don’t post many images on my blog, so I’d never use 10GB of space for images. One use I thought of would be for podcasts. This got me to thinking that perhaps the WordPress guys could build in a podcast recording thing on the blogging dashboard: you could simply record your podcast in WordPress, and then post it to your blog. I know you can record podcasts at Odeo and then post them in your blog, but I figure being able to record podcasts within WordPress would just be 1 step simpler. I’ve often seen WordPress blogs being used in conjunction with podcasting, so it’s not that long of a stretch.

I’ve never tried making a podcast, and never even considered starting a regular podcast, but I’d probably use it occasionally if it were built right into WordPress, if for nothing else than a change of pace on my blog and for a bit of fun. It can’t hurt for readers to know more about me, even if it’s what I sound like.

So, worry not. It’ll be fixed soon, I’m sure.

Update: And things are back to normal.

As you can guess from the title of this post (or from the address bar, if you visit my blog directly, as opposed to via feed), I grabbed the domain name system13.org. I was hoping system13.com or .net would be open, but alas, they were both taken earlier this year in August. Kind of odd, actually; that was just shortly after I started this blog. Darn. Ah well.

Honestly, I didn’t really have to have a domain name for my blog here. I’ve been quite happy with system13.wordpress.com for months now, and I could continue happily blogging at that address indefinitely. So, why buy the domain name? Quite honestly, to give a bit of kudos to the WordPress.com guys. I think they deserve it. Since I started blogging a few years ago, I’ve used / test-driven a lot of different blogging platforms:

• Blogger
• TypePad
• WordPress (with my own hosting)
• And finally, WordPress.com

Out of all of those, my experience with WordPress.com has been by far the best. When I first started using Blogger, and up until I switched to WordPress, the performance was awful. Half the time you couldn’t log in. Half the time when you could log in, Blogger would refuse to post; other times, it’d act like it posted your entry, but instead, it would actually eat your post. In general, it sucked. I can’t really comment on Blogger’s recent performance though, seeing as I’ve not used it in a long time.

TypePad was alright, but the pricing is a bit steep considering what you get. It’s really steep when you consider the fact that you get a better blogging platform with WordPress, which is free. (I’m not biased, am I? ) Even if TypePad were free, though, I’d still prefer WordPress.

Stand-alone WordPress (i.e., hosted on my own webspace) was great, barring the fact that I always had to worry about hosting issues. Invariably, there were hosting problems. Site unavailable; the server my site was on was too crowded, and thus, my site was slow; permission problems on the files, which threw ugly database errors at me. That, and there was the fact that I had tinkeritis, and every time I’d mess with something, I’d break something. But I digress..

My experience with WordPress.com has been awesome. In the few months I’ve been blogging here, I’ve never tried to log in and it not work. It’s never lost any of my posts. Akismet catches basically 99.999% of the spam comments that come through. And, besides paying for the domain and custom CSS, it’s all been free. I’ll be able to use my domain and CSS until late into 2007. Where could I find a webhost that offers awesome service, unlimited space and bandwidth, and great features, all for $30/year? I don’t think it’s going to be happening.

Thanks for all the work, WordPress.com folks. You guys rock.

Ah, one more bit to the folks linking to my blog: if you want to change your links to point to system13.org, that’s cool. If not.. that’s cool, too. People will end up at System 13 regardless.

I don’t really know if this bantering-via-letters goes on in newspapers anymore. Where I’m at in the world, there’s really only 1 decent local newspaper, and truth be told, I don’t really read it much. I suppose the Letter to the Editor section could be seen in a similar light as the abolitionist / anti-abolitionist letters being published in The Philanthropist. However, I’ve never really seen an instance where someone responds to a Letter to the Editor with another letter sent in to the editor. Then again, considering how bloody easy it is (and free, too) to get your own blog now, I suppose most people would just skip the middle man altogether.

Quick question to provide some more food for thought: how would the anti-slavery movement progressed if they’d had the internet and blogs back then?

*In the book, it was quite often John Rankin, seeing as he was one of the main focuses of the book

Coolness.

Well, I need to alter that story a bit. It’s still saying that the user’s blog has been deleted whenever I login. However, I just noticed the reason: whenever I log in, it’s bouncing me to the blog URL I got when I first signed up with my current username . I did indeed delete that blog. Question is, why is WordPress.com all of a sudden bouncing me over to that ancient URL when I log in? It never did that before. Before, it’d log me in, then reload the front WP.com page with a link to my blog, along with the WP.com control panel at the top.

Odd. Feedback ticket submitted.

Update: Podz from the WP.com help forums contacted me. It’s a weird bug they’re experiencing right now, and they’re working on it.

No, I did not elect to delete my blog; please don’t tell me that! When I first saw that I was afraid I’d been hacked, but luckily, by going to WordPress.com after logging in, I was presented with the correct view: my blog name off to the right, and the WordPress.com control panel up at the top.

Yeesh. Way to scare a guy in the morning. I think I’m going to export a backup of my blog now and email it to myself for safe keeping.

After moving my blog to system13.wordpress.com, I wanted to get a nice custom theme up and running. This is just my long-running tinkeritis rearing its ugly head. Luckily enough, the WordPress.com folks had just recently made a cheap CSS upgrade available, so I was able to indulge my inner demon.

Due to the science fiction slant of the title, I made the theme have a science fiction slant as well. I think it turned out well enough, considering I’m not a designer of any sort. All in all I think it gives off a science / science fiction impression.

However, I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. I say this in part due to reading Does your site have curb appeal? I think my blog looks alright, and if nothing else, it stands out a bit from all of the premade themes available, at least a little bit. I guess my concern isn’t that my ‘house’ is ugly; it’s that perhaps my house’s exterior gives off the wrong impression. Kind of like a building looking like a toy store, when in fact it’s a book store, or perhaps a beauty salon. It’s also kind of like books; while the old adage is, “don’t judge a book by its cover”, I think just about everyone does, at least to an extent.

So, what’s the first impression newcomers get when they see the science ficton-ish title, coupled with the science fiction-ish theme? Do they think it’s a blog mostly about science and science fiction, or do they see the theme for what it is: just another pretty wrapper?

What’s your take on it? Should I perhaps make the header a little more generic, to match the random nature of my blog, or should I leave it be?

Oh, and a personal note to Slone: no, I’m not getting back into the obsessive compulsive tinkering with the design. I’m not talking about an all out overhaul; just a header image swap, most likely.